Who remembers Y2K?

I made a reference to Y2K in my column this week in an attempt to figure out why the championship banners at Shoreham-Wading River stopped going on the walls somewhere around 1999. Well Y2K as you remember was the issue regarding computer software needing to be updated to go past '99.' A lot of people thought this would be the end of the world. Seriously.

Most of 1999 you couldn't pick up a newspaper or watch TV news without a Y2K story. The other day in the office a couple of us sports guys were killing time by watching SportsCenter commercials on YouTube. It brings me back to one of my favorite commercials of all-time, the Y2K SportsCenter commercial. An absolute classic, which was funny on several fronts.



My favorite part of this is obviously Charley Steiner at the end, who really steals the show. Steiner was one of the original SportsCenter anchors and played a tremendous role in the first commercials. I was lucky enough to meet Steiner once out in Palm Springs at an award dinner. We talked for a few minutes and he asked me where I lived, so I said East Patchogue. To which he replied, "That's waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out there on the Island." To which I replied rather awkwardly, well it's not that far...
He must not have vacationed in Montauk too often.

Anyways, at the end of the commercial, I love how Steiner is wearing his tie around his head. "Follow me! Follow me to freedom!" was a phrase I, and I'm sure many other kids at the time, repeated over and over.

But I also love Mark McGwire smashing computers. It's funny to think about how McGwire was really a beloved sports figure for a time. Then we find out the obvious that he was juicing and C-YA lata.

This commercial was also great because it made fun of just how stupid the entire Y2K issue was. People really thought that at the strike of midnight, it would be chaos like that commercial. Didn't happen. A good thing. Maybe in the year 2999 people will be smart enough to avoid a Y3K problem. If not, we may at least get another great SportsCenter commercial out of it.